Brooke Bundy

All posts tagged Brooke Bundy

She played Elaine Parker, the mother that you love to hate, in the A Nightmare on Elm Streetseries, but true celluloid buffs know that the versatile Brooke Bundy played a wide variety of roles throughout her career. Like her doomed Diana on General Hospital, whose murder has long been considered one of the greatest crime mystery plotlines of the golden age of the soap operas, many of these credits took place on a variety of popular television shows.

Perhaps most notably, the first season of Charlie’s Angels found Bundy interacting with Farrah and crew as an ex-street walker turned Las Vegas chorus girl wanna-be. Her character, filled with both a sense of street smarts and sweetness by this layered performer, was even romanced here by David Doyle’s goofily lovable Bosley.

Of course, Parker was not the only troubled mother in Bundy’s arsenal. Not as famously, perhaps, she played another matriarch on the final season of CHiPS. Here, as the emotionally unstable parent of a young girl played by Halloween’s Kyle Richards, she nicely shows a lot of subtlety and depth even though she is only featured in a couple of scenes. The quiet seriousness she adds also brings a bit of believability to this jump the shark episode that focuses on a space alien that is trying to bring Richards back to its home planet.

Bundy also appeared on a variety of interesting yet more obscure television shows, as well. A 1973 episode of Circle of Fear, an unusual and short lived horror anthology series, found her playing a member of an artists’ colony who is suddenly sucked into an ancient bottle by a vengeful group of pagan gods and goddesses. That same year, her sensible character was unable to save her man from the sensual lure of Lesley Ann Warren’s vampiric succubus on the Death on a Bargeentry of Night Gallery, a vignette that was directed by none other than Star Trek’s most legendary Vulcan, Leonard Nimoy.

Nicely, now you can celebrate all of these interesting credits and so many more at Bundy’s recently created fan page: https://www.facebook.com/brookebundyfanpage/. Her activities, such as con appearances, will be noted there, as well.

So, as the shout of “Kristen!” whistles through your brain…until the next time, SWEET love and pink GRUE, Big Gay Horror Fan!

While British actresses such as Ingrid Pitt and Eileen Daly have seemingly cornered the market on the sensuous vampire due to Hammer and its latter day ilk, luckily, lovely New York-born performer Lesley Ann Warren graced the small screen with Hyacinth, her truly erotic creature of the night, in the steamy 1973 episode of Night Gallery entitled Death on a Barge.

Languishingly lounging on a candle strewn barge, Warren’s unearthly creature soon earns the undivided attention of a small town clerk. His consistent nocturnal visits eventually make his girlfriend (played by Nightmare on Elm Street 3 & 4’s Brooke Bundy) curious. When her encounter with the fang bearing Hyacinth almost leaves her dead, she determines that her beau’s mysterious new obsession is, indeed, a vampire. Will a jealous co-worker and a possessive sweetheart soon mean the end of the gorgeous Hyacinth or vice versa?

This episode (written by Halsted Welles via Everill Worrell’s story and directed by Leonard Nimoy) definitely reinvents some of the bloodsucker rules. Hyacinth hasn’t fed for over a year and is watched over by her human father. Yet the gothic Tennessee Williams’ vibe that Nimoy indulges in here is enchanting and the fetching Warren, whose other genre appearances include the CW enhanced Teaching Mrs. Tingle and 2001’s very interesting Wolf Girl, glows within its tragic overtones. She is magnetic, frightening and sympathetic. It’s a bravura performance in (a mere) 22 minute teleplay.